Thursday, April 12, 2018

The School of Law of University of Padova has issued a call for papers for a conference on "International Lawyers and Human Dignity," to be held on the eightieth anniversary of the promulgation of the Italian Racial Laws, November 23-24, 2018, in Padova. The call is here.

In 2015, the United States Department of Defense published its long-awaited Law of War Manual making a significant statement on the position of the US government on important military matters. Whilst readers recognise the Manual's legal and strategic importance, they may question whether particular statements of law are legally accurate or complete. This book offers a unique in-depth review of the complete Manual, including revisions, on a paragraph-by-paragraph, line-by-line and word-by-word basis. The authors offer their personal assessment of the DoD's declared view as to the law that regulates the conduct of warfare, a subject of unparalleled current importance.

The rapid proliferation of international investment treaties brought the concern over the legitimacy of the system of investor-State dispute settlement, which resulted in proposals for its radical redesign. Against this background, this seminar examines how ethical and the rule of law concerns can be better addressed within the existing system.
The first panel focuses on ethical issues, including arbitrator and counsel ethics, third-party-funding and transparency. The second panel discusses the rule of law issues, such as reconciling different interpretations of treaties, societal values and conflict of law issues to promote legal certainty and consistency of international investment law.

The aim of the study is to ascertain the role and function of arbitration within the compulsory procedures entailing binding decision under Part XV of UNCLOS, through a systematic scrutiny of the rules of procedure of the arbitration tribunals established in accordance with Annex VII of the UNCLOS and an analysis of the relevant jurisprudence of these tribunals.

On May 11, 2018, the Law School of the University of Westminster will host a conference on "Sufficient Gravity before the International Criminal Court." The program is here. Here's the idea:

The assessment of sufficient gravity has played a pivotal role in recent proceedings before the International Criminal Court (ICC). Under the ICC Statute, situations are investigated and individuals are prosecuted if a case is of a sufficient gravity. However, the ICC Statute nowhere defines gravity, nor are there any indications regarding the elements that are relevant in the assessment of sufficient gravity. The Appeals Chamber has not offered any interpretation of the gravity threshold, while the references provided by the ICC Pre-Trial and Trial Chambers have been scant and inconclusive. Accordingly, the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) has enjoyed great discretion on whether to open an investigation or to initiate proceedings on the basis of its assessment of the sufficient gravity threshold. For instance, in 2006 the OTP refused to open an investigation on alleged international crimes committed in Iraq due to a lack of sufficient gravity. Similarly, in 2014 the OTP refused to open an investigation regarding the boarding of the Mavi Marmara vessel by the Israeli Defense Force as the situation was not considered sufficiently grave: although this decision was reversed by the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber, on 29 November 2017 the Prosecution confirmed its assessment regarding the lack of sufficient gravity.
The conference discusses the issue of sufficient gravity under the ICC Statute in a comprehensive manner. The conference brings together experts of international criminal law and of other areas of international law in order to answer some questions about gravity never explored before.

The Review of International Organizations has issued a call for submissions for a special issue on "International Organizations in a New Era of Populist Nationalism." The call is here. The deadline is April 15, 2018.

Torture represents a direct attack on the essence of human dignity. Its mere mention evokes a prolific and sordid history: Europe in the Middle Ages, with beds of nails, witch hunts, and burnings; the brutal methods used by military dictatorships against political dissidents in 1970s Latin America; and the gruesome photographs from Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and other Bush-era places of detention. While leaders in the West had once hoped that torture would disappear by the end of the twentieth century—and that our children would read about this unfathomable practice in history books and not in the daily papers—research indicates that torture is still routinely used in the majority of twenty-first-century nations.

In his six years as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak was tasked with reviewing thousands of complaints of torture and detention, investigating facts and circumstances surrounding the global practice of torture, and drawing up recommendations aimed at combating torture. Now, in Torture, readers can get a firsthand glimpse of how modern-day torture is investigated and understood by those working on the frontlines of researching, addressing, and preventing it.

Nowak recounts his experience visiting countries, reviewing documents, collecting evidence, and conducting interviews with perpetrators, witnesses, and victims of torture. He offers vignettes of the many states he visited, comparing their diverse experiences, and he explores the rise of new twenty-first-century practices of torture, questioning whether capital punishment, corporal punishment, solitary confinement, and contemporary forms of slavery qualify as torture. Ultimately, Torture offers vital insights for human-rights scholars and professionals as it tries to make the unfathomable more comprehensible and to clarify the causes and dynamics of torture.

Maynooth University's Department of Law has issued a call for papers for a conference on "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights at Seventy: A Review of Successes and Challenges," to be held June 21-22, 2018. The call is here.

This draft chapter examines the use of dissenting opinions in WTO and GATT dispute settlement. Although WTO dispute settlement panelists and individual Appellate Body members sitting on a division hearing an appeal have the power to issue dissents, dissents have been discouraged both in the structure of the applicable rules and in practice. Nonetheless, panelists and Appellate Body members have issued dissents from time to time, with certain types of cases garnering more disagreement than others. This chapter first identifies the relevant rules applicable to separate opinion-writing at the GATT panel and WTO panel and Appellate Body levels and discusses whether those rules or other indicia suggest an anti-dissent or a more neutral message. Part II of the chapter notes some methodological difficulties in precisely quantifying the incidence of dissents in the WTO era. It goes on to identify and describe the dissents issued by WTO panels and divisions of the Appellate Body, as well as to discuss other decisions that, while not traditional dissents, provide a broader perspective on dissenting and writing separately in the WTO context. Part III offers some brief observations about the nature and incidence of dissents in GATT and WTO jurisprudence, and Part IV concludes.

Iura Novit Curia in International Arbitration addresses a question that has attracted the attention of both scholars and practitioners for some time, namely that of whether arbitral tribunals may develop their own legal reasoning independently of the agreement and pleadings of the parties, something that may be looked upon as an oxymoron, given that arbitration itself is considered to be nothing but the result of manifestations of party autonomy – at least according to mainstream understanding of arbitration.
The national reports included in this book, all drafted by distinguished academics and practitioners, are based on a questionnaire that can be found following this collection. These reports represent 15 major jurisdictions: Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the USA. The book also includes a general report, as well as a chapter by Friedrich Rosenfeld assessing how the principle iura novit curia is dealt with in international law.

While the proliferation of ICs has been described in details, we know surprisingly little about who the actual judges sitting at the helm of contemporary judicialized international law and ruling (on) the world are. What has once been termed the “invisible college of international law” remains to a large extent invisible to this day. But it is now a much larger college as the proliferation of ICs has resulted in a corresponding multiplication of the number of international judges. Today, more than three hundred men and women hold the office of international judge. Most are found in Europe, at the two regional courts of the Court of Justice of the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights, but many other regional and global courts also employ a significant number of international judges. Besides some mainly descriptive studies of the international judiciary, we have very little analysis of who these people are and what commonalities they have, notably in terms of education, knowledge, and know-how. This paper remedies this gap in scholarship and presents a first systematic study of the configuration of the international judiciary.

Theresa Squatrito (Univ. of Liverpool), Oran Young (Univ. of California, Santa Barbara), Andreas Follesdal (Universitetet i Oslo), & Geir Ulfstein (Universitetet i Oslo) have published The Performance of International Courts and Tribunals (Cambridge Univ. Press 2018). The table of contents is here. Here's the abstract:

International courts and tribunals now operate globally and in several world regions, playing significant roles in international law and global governance. However, these courts vary significantly in terms of their practices, procedures, and the outcomes they produce. Why do some international courts perform better than others? Which factors affect the outcome of these courts and tribunals? The Performance of International Courts and Tribunals is an interdisciplinary study featuring approaches, methods and authorship from law and political science, which proposes the concept of performance to describe the processes and outcomes of international courts. It develops a framework for evaluating and explaining performance by offering a broad comparative analysis of international courts, covering several world regions and the areas of trade, investment, the environment, human rights and criminal law, and offers interdisciplinary accounts to explain how and why international court performance varies.

International Criminal Investigations: Law & Practice is the first of its kind – a resource book on selected topics assessing more than twenty years of international criminal investigations, while addressing the practicalities and challenges of such investigations. It explores, from the perspective of expert practitioners, a thematic approach to important issues such as investigative strategies, planning and interview techniques for specific witnesses, financial investigations, while incorporating the personal experiences of those who have served as pioneers in this field. A necessary addition to the literature on international criminal law in practice, this volume meaningfully contributes to increased knowledge of the science and art involved in international criminal investigations.

The aim of this article is to flesh out the implications of seeing universal jurisdiction as a claim to authority. While the idea that jurisdiction is an exercise of authority may seem obvious, the article invites attention to the ‘claim’ inherent within it, particularly where the exercise of jurisdiction intrudes upon or displaces competing claims. Legal scholars and practitioners tend to focus on the legal source of authority to exercise universal jurisdiction. The consequence is a tendency to think in binary terms: a court either has jurisdiction, in which case the matter will proceed (without further attention to the question of jurisdiction), or it does not, in which case the whole matter is at an end. Jurisdictional thinking invites attention to the need for those asserting such a claim to take responsibility for these claims to authority, encouraging responsiveness to the normative communities such claims put into relation and the potential need to rethink conventional modes of operation. The article proceeds in two parts. Part I examines the deficiencies in the dominant ‘legal source’ narrative on universal jurisdiction. Part II assesses the value of understanding the legal-political dimension of universal jurisdiction as a claim to authority that must be understood, and justified, with attention to its purpose and the community (or communities) it is intended to serve.